New parents quickly discover the truth of the saying that “the days are long but the years are short.” While each night finds them falling bone-tired into their beds, the months on the calendar seem to fly by relentlessly.
Older parents’ perspective enables them to see that these years of raising children represent a really short season, after all, while young parents are suddenly caught up short by how quickly their babies grow up.
I was recently treated to a fascinating segment on National Public Radio from Radio Lab. It is from a program entitled “The Parent Clock,” a segment from Tony Schwartz and his “Tony Schwartz Records the Sounds of Children.” You can listen to it yourself at http://www.radiolab.org/story/91584-time/.
This very short segment (2 minutes and 12 seconds) races through the language development of Schwartz’ niece Nancy. He recorded Nancy every year from infancy to her teen years. His carefully edited compilation makes for a lovely tribute to the acquisition of language in humans, as we listen to the ever-more complex speech of this little girl from New England in the 1950s and 60s.
The segment begins with the frantic crying of a fussy newborn and marches right through childhood. We hear Nancy describe what she hopes Santa will bring her for Christmas and how to housebreak a puppy. It ends with adolescent Nancy’s coy admission that “I’m discovering boys.”
Following the recording of Nancy’s language evolution, the segment then refers to this rapid childhood passage as “The Parent Clock,” noting the painful truth that as your child gets older in the blink of an eye, so do you. As Nancy aged, so did her parents.
In fact, as parents raise their children, they are so focused on their kids’ needs and the work to be done that they often forget that they are growing older, too. Then when the task of childrearing is complete, parents catch their breath only to discover lines in their faces that were undoubtedly being etched there gradually over the years.
Just as our children grow up too fast, our “parent clocks” tick inexorably forward. We earn our wrinkles and gray hair, one life-filled moment at a time.
